Category: Food for thought

My last vacation was 10 months ago, and I can’t believe it’s been that long. I’m definitely feeling the affects of not taking any time off with work being so stressful and having to study after hours. I really don’t know how some people do it but seriously everyone needs a break right?

On this upcoming trip I haven’t planned any activities for me and my husband to do. This time around I’ve decided that we’re just going to wing it. I’ve always been the planner but now that I’m a wee bit older, I’m starting to view vacation as a means to just relax. In the past vacation was always about an adventure –what site to see, what food to try, or what museum to visit. Now I think it’ll just be good to take time off and randomly explore a new city.

In other news, I’m slowly getting over the damaged packaging my sheetmasks came in. It wasn’t just about the sheetmasks, it was also about an eye cream (Innisfree Orchid Eye Cream) I ordered last month that was supposed to come in today. Well it never came and I’m starting to think otherwise about shopping on Amazon for international products. I seriously don’t want to keep ordering from them if my package and/or product comes to me defective. It’s a hassle to return because it’s unwanted waste of my time to have to ship it back, and because it feels like I’m getting ripped off. I get it, accidents do happen. But who pays for it? The customer. I’m really hoping Amazon does something about my two orders –one coming to me damaged and the other not even arriving. Ugh, I really need a vacation.

Update: Seller has contacted me to refund my money for the eye cream.

Innisfree Eye Cream – I really wanted to try this, but it hasn’t come in yet and it’s been a month already.

For anyone trying to climb the social ladder, it’s quite THE investment. At least it’s an investment in yourself right? So yesterday I went to take one part of a test in my profession and saw this morning that I passed. I passed! It feels so good and uplifting to get good news because work life has been super demanding, and my mental health was taking a nose dive from all the pressure. It also didn’t help that I failed this test the first time around and I guess I’ve been hung up on it ever since. So to better prepare the second time around, I pretty much bought a lot of recommended study material and a practice book. It worked but let me just say that it wasn’t cheap and it doesn’t look like it’s going to get any cheaper. Now that I know I need to read more content, at least the parts of my profession I don’t do everyday, I have to pick up quite a bit of study material. Lucky for me I have a great boss who reimburses the cost of testing if passed and also reimburses for study material.

For those not so fortunate, it gets expensive right? I mean it definitely adds up. For those in the medical field especially those testing to be doctors, optometrists, or pharmacists I don’t think they get reimbursed for their testing. Even for lawyers I’m not so sure that’s how it works either. I can’t even quantify the amount of school, money, and time people put into these professions. For those less fortunate who dream a bigger dream, the student loan burden must be hard to deal with. The loans eventually get paid off, but still the anxiety from such a large loan amount must be crazy. I think people don’t think about these things when they’re in college. Even for myself I didn’t think about repaying my loan until after I graduated. It was only after finishing when I realized how much borrowing sucks, and how much less I could’ve borrowed. But I digress. The amount of money poured into a person’s profession doesn’t stop after college. There’s fee associations to pay into, license fees, and cost of study materials. Then throw all of this into a person’s life and suddenly it get’s expensive, because let’s face it, having a social life is not cheap either. There are baby showers to go to, weddings to attend, and other things in life that deserve our money more than association or license fees.

When it rains it pours. Sometimes life doesn’t work out the ways it’s supposed to and expenses can pile up fairly quickly. First I had to change flight plans which cost $250 for me and my husband. Then my front tire needed to get replaced and rotated so there went $130. Wasn’t able to work out arrangements to attend a destination wedding so to compensate, I’m planning to gift a very large sum of money. I’ve already saved up $400, but plan to dish an additional $300. Also remember my tax bill? Well I just sent California $733, and they’ve already taken it out of my bank account. Lucky for me I have a healthy emergency fund to cover all of this, but that’s why it’s so important to have money saved because seriously when it rains, sometimes it pours. I’m just grateful that I’m not going into debt for this, but still it’s a lot of money going out at one time.

Retail and retail websites have it right. They have a return policy that makes it easy to correct a mistake if needed. Two weeks ago I over ordered on skincare products through Amazon and was able to cancel some since they weren’t processed. It was very easy to cancel and all I had to do was hit the ‘Cancel’ button. This is also another reason why Amazon is probably dominating the market right now and why Jeff Bezos is the richest man in the world. People shop on Amazon because it’s secure, there’s Prime, and because there’s room to make some mistakes. Costco is another example of a company with a great return policy. Despite limited store hours, they remain popular and often times busy on the weekends and after work hours on the weekdays. If more companies put a little more effort into their return or cancellation policies, then there would be more happy customers in life. I mean I swear we all make mistakes right?

Then you have the airline industry or third party vendors like Expedia who have horrible cancellation policies. It’s funny because in retail there’s opportunity for returns on a product that probably won’t break the bank. However, cancelling an airplane ticket means forfeiting your money or having to pay a ridiculous cancellation fee just to change flights. This to me is just highway robbery. Customers are left with nothing.

Recently I decided to pull some money out of our brokerage account to put back in the bank. Well I sort of had a change of heart, but it was too late to make a change. There was no delete button or no cancel button. I even tried to edit the amount just so I wouldn’t pull so much out, but that didn’t even work. This raises the issue that more and more companies need to build in an edit or cancel button because many of us need one. There are articles being written about millennials and perfectionism from USA Today to the New York Post. Well, it’s probably because there’s no back button, no edit or cancel button to many websites we interact with. Okay probably not the main reason, but you get the gist. Even if we try to correct our mistake, we’ll probably be met with “sorry that’s user error”. Okay, then what’s the point of having jobs called UI Desinger?